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Insights on events, technology, and the future of gathering
Quick answer: An event app increases attendee engagement by putting the whole event in each attendee’s pocket. Personalized agendas, an attendee directory, in-event surveys, activity feeds, social media integration, gamification, live polls, and post-event follow-up all encourage people to participate before, during, and after your event - no custom development required.
Event app or no event app? That’s one of the biggest questions we get here at Canapii. Event organizers have their plates full: they need to choose an event format (in-person, virtual, or hybrid) while managing the technology expectations of their team and prospective attendees. An event app plays a big role in both.
We’ve seen how effective an event app for in-person events can be in boosting attendance, engagement, and revenue - and you don’t need to build one from scratch. An off-the-shelf app works just fine, as long as you can customize it to your liking. Here’s what an event app is and the eight ways it keeps attendees engaged.
An event app is a purpose-built mobile app designed just for your event. Like the apps on your phone that let you order food, check social media, or play a game, it gives attendees a single place to plan their visit, connect with other people, and interact with your content.
A typical event app includes features like:
Personalized agendas and session reminders
An attendee directory for networking
A venue map
A live event feed and social media feeds
Event gamification
Live polls, Q&As, and event surveys
In-app purchases
In the past, event apps were custom tools that were expensive and time-consuming to create. Today, event platform companies like Canapii offer out-of-the-box solutions that are ready to brand and deploy, making it easy to integrate an app into your event marketing.
Here are eight reasons why you should consider using an event app:
An event app lets every attendee build a personal agenda, so they never miss the sessions that brought them to your event in the first place. Instead of spending marketing budget on printed agendas and collateral, you digitize your content: event-goers download the app and access everything from a single place.
Users can select the sessions they’re interested in and get automatic reminders when those sessions are about to begin. Interactive agendas share key details at scale - session name, speaker, room or location, and duration - and at large events attendees can search sessions by topic, speaker, or other detail. Attendees take their time into their own hands from the very start of your event, which is exactly where engagement begins.
Going to an event where you don’t know anyone can feel daunting. Networking is an expected benefit of attending, but many people find it hard to approach a perfect stranger. A mobile event app serves as an icebreaker: a built-in directory lets attendees find and connect with each other by name, company, job title, or shared interests, with profiles that include a headshot and bio so people can put names and faces together when they meet in person.
Event planners can promote engagement further with push notifications - for instance, introducing attendees who share characteristics. During registration, prompt attendees to add details like hobbies or fun facts about themselves: the more people participate, the more powerful your event app becomes.
Traditionally, organizers send a single survey after the event concludes - useful hindsight for next time, but too late to improve anything at this event. With an event app, you can send surveys throughout the event, collecting sentiment on each session and adjusting your approach for the sessions that follow.
For example, you might ask:
Did you enjoy this presentation?
Was the temperature of the room comfortable?
Was there enough seating?
Did the session experience any technical difficulties?
Could you hear and see the content being presented?
We suggest sending single-question surveys during the event. They’re quick and easy to answer, which encourages participation, and they give you real-time insights so you can make adjustments as you go instead of waiting until the end.
Attendees often get caught up in the moment and focus only on their own agendas, which means they can miss key event moments. Event apps offer the best of both worlds: event-goers stay focused on their own experience while checking the in-app activity feed to see what’s going on around them.
Anyone can contribute to the feed - organizers share important announcements, and attendees upload their own photos, helping you build an impressive library of user-generated content to market future events. The feed can even draw attention to sessions, speakers, or functions attendees didn’t know about, making the event instantly more valuable to them.
Your attendees are creating plenty of content on their own social channels too. Share a branded hashtag with your audience and include social links in the event app: any post that uses the hashtag automatically appears in the in-app social feed, giving everyone a glimpse into other attendees’ experiences.
This encourages more people to use your event app and stay engaged instead of venturing away from it. It also gives you an easy way to capture user-generated content for your event marketing campaigns - hype for your next event and added credibility for your brand.
The most successful events know how to turn participation into a friendly competition that everyone can win. Gamifying an event is challenging without an event app; using the app, you can send your audience challenges tied to your event - visiting specific vendors, attending a certain number of sessions - and track their progress every step of the way.
Use push notifications to award points when users complete challenges, and let them see their progress, view rewards, and cash them in, all from the app. The more attendees participate, the more impactful the event becomes for them.
Similar to in-event surveys, live polling encourages quick, low-effort engagement from your audience throughout the event. Send periodic polls to collect important insights or simply learn more about your attendees’ preferences. Some examples include:
Which speaker have you enjoyed the most?
What has been your favorite part of the event?
Why did you come, and what do you want to get out of the event?
Fun questions, like your favorite ice cream flavor
An ask-the-audience question pulled from a speaker’s session
Share the collective results with your audience immediately after they answer. Seeing how their opinions stack up against other attendees makes people more inclined to respond to the next poll.
Engagement doesn’t have to end when your event concludes. A conference app can keep the conversation going: Canapii’s platform stays available to attendees post-event, so they can come back to review content, keep a dialog going with their new connections, and use the information they collected during the event.
You also get an easy way to send post-event surveys, polls, and communications at scale. In the days and weeks after the event, ask your audience how they’re applying their learnings or what their biggest takeaway was - a direct window into your event’s most impactful moments. And if the event is annual, you now have a ready-made list of hot leads for next year’s marketing, ideal for early-registration discounts or exclusive perks for repeat attendees.
As an all-inclusive event management platform, Canapii simplifies the process of adding an app to your event. The Canapii event app is ready to customize with your graphics, colors, and branding, and features like polls, surveys, live chat, social media, activity feeds, and gamification are already baked in. Canapii has powered 2,000+ events for 300,000+ attendees across 45+ countries, backed by 24/7 support.
Combine your event app with the rest of Canapii’s event management platform features, such as real-time analytics, registration management, live streaming, and sponsor management. Spend less time putting the pieces together and free up more time to make an impact.
An event app is a purpose-built mobile app for a specific event. It gives attendees personalized agendas, networking tools, live polls, surveys, activity feeds, and gamification in one place, and gives organizers a direct channel to every attendee.
No. Off-the-shelf event apps from platforms like Canapii are ready to customize with your branding and deploy in a fraction of the time and cost of custom development.
It gives attendees control from the start - building their own agendas and finding people worth meeting - then keeps them participating with in-event surveys, activity feeds, gamification, and live polls, and continues the conversation after the event ends.
Yes. Canapii’s platform remains available post-event, so attendees can review content and keep talking to new connections, while organizers send post-event surveys and nurture repeat attendance for next year.
Ready to see what an event app can do for your attendee engagement? Request a demo and see Canapii’s event app in action.